Business Showcase : Xylo

Xylo is a Collaborative Music Video Community that makes it easy to shoot, share and discover professional looking videos that you can create in seconds.

How are you different?

Comparing to similar apps, we unite all the best features on one platform. While Xylo mixes music tracks, it creates a professionally looking videos and at the same time it is a space for sharing, inspiring and collaborating.

There are millions of musicians, who don’t have the professional records and are struggling to show their talent. That what Xylo is about. We want every talented person to have a possibility to create and be noticed, share easily made videos in their social networks.

Where are you based?

Team is based in Vilnius, Spain and NY.

When was the company launched?

The idea for the application actually came from the development of other app, an education platform, Xylo Desk, which helps schools to manage the daily activities of their music programs. Teachers were requesting a simply way for students to submit video recordings of musical assignments using their mobile phone, that the teacher may later view and evaluate. As part of this solution, it was requested that a student could either play along with a recorded track, or to play together with the recording of another student.

As we set out to solve this challenge, we realized the task was far more complex than we had imagined, due to several technical limitations of mobile devices, particularly audio latency. Undeterred by such a challenge, we came upon a solution for resolving these limitations that we felt to be quite unique in the market. This solution allowed us to not only provide the ability to record while playing along with a single audio track, multiple tracks could be mixed together in a way similar to a multi-track recording studio.

Understanding we arrived on something very unique, and given the sudden popularity of user generated content and mobile video, we pivoted our attention and resources from focusing exclusively on music education, to developing a new platform for collaborative mobile music video making.

We already reached users with our Xylo v.1. However, we have launched brand new version in March 2017, that finally included all the planned features. With the update we engaged many local Lithuanian artist to try the app and establish creative community around Xylo. We don’t run for the quantity of users, but quality.

What type of people (market segment) are you trying to attract to your product?

When we started to develop Xylo, we expected the average age of our user to be around 16 years old. In reality, this has been pretty much the lowest age we have observed on the platform, with most users falling somewhere in their mid 20’s. This is quite surprising for a user generated content platform, particularly in video, which suggests that we really are tapping into an unaddressed market segment.

In addition to age, the quality of the content produced has really exceeded our expectations. 90% of the content being created is done by very proficient musicians, where we had anticipated this segment would be well under 20%. Having this level of quality will certainly help to attract more quality musicians, who will in turn attract the enthusiasts.

Tell us about your team?

Team members: http://corp.xylo.com/about/team/

As typical start-up, we are small. In the busy day one can meet up to 10 people at office and most of them will be our developers. There is also a marketing team of 3 with couple of interns. Our founder and CEO – Daniel Ray.

What are your long term plans for your product/company?

Xylo was never imagined to be a single product company. As we drive forward with our aim of making the best music video creation tools in the market, we will begin to introduce new products and services that will compliment our current offerings. There is so much yet to be explored in digital transformation of the all aspects of the music industry, and we plan to be a part of this for years to come.

What are your favourite tech gadgets?

As Xylo does not eliminate any people, we are trying to work for all mobile phones. We love the desks of our developers, they test basically all mobiles to have the greatest performance.

What tech gadgets do you wish you could use to help you?

The best you can take with Xylo using not only phones, but good audio recording tools as well. We love good sound, so trying to get to perfection while our creative team is making videos. However, having phone and earphones is enough to create a nice Xylo.